Rose Knows

Q: Kris Allen. Over Adam Lambert. Really?

A: Apparently so.

I don’t usually pay much attention to American Idol, but this year I’ve had a lot of couch time to fill. Still, I think I could have addressed the final outcome without watching a single episode. It was a numbers thing, plain and simple.

Since Fox doesn’t release vote breakdowns, the best I have to work with is DialIdol.com reports. DialIdol uses an admittedly unscientific method of sampling Idol voters, but their predictions are usually spot-on.

Accounting for margin of error, the penultimate week’s voting breakdown showed a virtual three-way tie. With one of those performers eliminated, this theoretically leaves a third of the votes up for grabs.

The eliminee, of course, was Danny Gokey. Danny Gokey, who was as wholesome as he was bland. I mean, the guy looked genuinely thrilled to be singing with Lionel Richie during the season finale. Danny Gokey has no Elvis in him.

The majority of Gokey’s votes were not going to go to the guy who seemingly spent the whole season auditioning to be the new lead singer of Queen. If they couldn’t vote for the guy who might get through that godawful “No Boundaries” song with conviction, at least there was a finalist who could almost make it through with a straight face. You know what Adam was probably saying to Kris at the very end there? “Congratulations, man. Have fun singing ‘No Boundaries’ every night!” Isn’t it curious how Idol’s judges say they want to find an original voice, and then the producers make the winner sing some boring pseudo-inspirational pablum every single year? Oh, show. You’re funny even when you don’t mean to be. But I digress.

When I say that most of Gokey’s voters were going to prefer Kris over Adam, I’m saying that from a purely stylistic perspective. The is has nothing to do with personal style or sexual orientation, and everything to do with the fact that Adam Lambert’s style is about as opposite from Danny Gokey’s as one can get. Kris Allen’s performances just sound more like Gokey’s. The finalists were both one-trick ponies, which is not a bad thing to be when you’re trying to make music that people will buy. Judging from the vote, more people prefer stripping-down to amping-up.

Much has been made of the sexual orientation issue. (Adam’s not officially out, but he’s not exactly in, either.) I don’t think it affected the voting. Idol’s viewership skews young. There’s no reliable way of tracking Idol votes by age, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the younger viewers are the most active voters. Older viewers have other things to do with their time, like watching their 401(k)s dwindle, or voting for Dancing with the Stars.

Meanwhile, recent polling shows that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to support same-sex marriage. For example, the take-away from a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll:

Sixty-six percent of adults under age 30 support gay marriage. That drops to 48 percent of adults age 30 to 64 – and plummets to just 28 percent among senior citizens.

I don’t think it’s a big leap to infer that if someone supports same-sex marriage, they’re probably cool with the overall idea that someone might love, and/or lust after, someone of the same gender. (Note that I am not implying that if someone is against same-sex marriage, they’re homophobic – though if you take a look at the poll, I think you find a significant correlation.) There may be a segment of the Idol viewership that wouldn’t vote for Adam because he wears eyeliner, but the demographic odds are that they’re pretty small. In other words, they didn’t not vote for Adam because he looks like an ersatz Freddie Mercury. They didn’t vote for him because he sounds like one. They’d rather go with the ersatz singer of the Plain White T’s. And that’s just a matter of personal taste. Not my taste, but I’ll take either one of them over the ersatz Lionel Richie. That would just be wrong.

Q: What’s a smoke editor? — Ali

A: A video effects editor who uses the Smoke non-linear editing system.

Yeah, I know. Pretty dull to those of us who don’t do visual effects editing. But there you go.

Q: Who actually sang and played the instruments on “That Thing You Do”? — Katy

A: The singing I can tell you: Lead vocals were by Mike Viola of The Candy Butchers and, more recently, the fine collection of writers who worked on Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (Also a major contributor: Dan Bern. He has nothing else to do with this answer, but I will always link to Dan Bern when I have an excuse.) Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the song right around the time Fountains of Wayne was forming, sang backup. (Incidentally, he also wrote a bunch of the faux-80s songs for Music and Lyrics and was nominated for a Tony for the music for Cry-Baby. Which also has nothing else to do with this answer, but that’s obviously no deterrent to me.)

The instruments… there, I keep running into dead ends. The best I can come up with is, “session musicians”. The actors in the movie were well-schooled in playing their instruments on camera, but there’s no indication that they also performed on the released soundtrack.

I’ve trying to hunt down a used copy of the soundtrack CD so I can take a peek at the liner notes, but I haven’t had any luck so far. If anyone reading this owns a copy and can glean anything about the musicians from the packaging, shoot me the info and I’ll post a follow-up.

Q: Where can i find a copy of Jerry Lewis’ unreleased 1972 movie, The Day the Clown Cried? He plays a clown in a concentration camp. Thank you. — Bean

A: At Jerry Lewis’s house.

A quick explanation for everyone who’s not Bean: The Day the Clown Cried was going to be Jerry Lewis’s Big Serious Film: The story of a circus clown in Nazi Germany who winds up a political prisoner (because he mocked Hitler, not because he was a clown), starts performing for Jewish kids in the camp, and is eventually tasked with leading children to the gas chamber.

I’m not making this up. Check out the Wikipedia page or IMDB entry if you don’t believe me.

Thanks to ongoing financial disputes, no finished copies of this film exist in the wild. There are some scripts floating around; there are some photos; there are even some behind-the-scenes clips. And according to everyone who’s seen it — except for Jerry Lewis — it’s best to keep it that way.

According to various sources, Jerry Lewis has the only known videotape copy of The Day the Clown Cried. It’s said that he keeps it locked away in his office, occasionally bringing it out to reflect on what might have been. Legend has it that the original negative is out there somewhere, but is too ashamed to show itself. (That, or it’s still in the possession of a production company which claims they’re owed money on the film. Which is pretty much the same thing.)

Still don’t believe in the inherent awfulness of this film? Check out the script. Read the articles collected at Subterranean Cinema, where they’ve collected everything there is to collect. (Warning: By clicking on that link, you are exposing yourself to pictures of Jerry Lewis in clown makeup.)

See, everyone who’s not Bean? I told you I wasn’t making this up.

Back to the question. I’ve answered it in the literal sense, but I get the feeling that despite all warnings, you actually want to view this piece of cinematic…uh, cinema. According to his web site, “Jerry hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation.” So all you have to do is track down Jerry Lewis, convince him that you’re the person to untangle the legal mess (which seems untangleable by design, but never mind), and ask him to show you his copy so that you can testify as to the film’s cinematic merit. View it, thank him, and run like hell. Yes, it’s a mean thing to do, but this is the guy who still thinks it was a good idea to play a complicit clown in a concentration camp. I think you’d be about even.